Author Comments

//EDIT: 24th Oct 2011
I just wanted to say thanks so much for the front page! Believe it or not I first signed up to Newgrounds in 2001 as a very young kid, and ever since then I've wanted to be honoured with this rare privilege - so a very heartfelt thanks to Tom and the whole Newgrounds team!
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Help your new found friend The Octopod rescue the girl of his dreams from the evil Bad Mood Bear!

Can you collect all 16 medals, rescue all hostages, return every chicken to its nest, defeat all enemies and conquer the Bad Mood Bear?

Rated 2.5 / 5 stars2011-10-31 15:07:55

All that potential, wasted.

From the moment this game started up, i thought it would be great. The art was cute and the opening cutscene actually made me laugh.

Then the game started.

I wasn't immediately sold on the control scheme, much prefering either A or space to be my jump button, and i wasn't given an option to change them. No biggie, i'll keep truckin' along. Although i wanted them remapped, i thought the things you could do in game were pretty cool and diverse - even giving enough options for strategy. My favourite thing to do was play "tennis" - i would throw the octopod into the air, run back a bit, then jump towards it as it fell and smack it into someones face. It was hilarious each and every time. I even managed to get double kills, triple kills and rebound shots, further adding to my delight.

Unfortunately this is where the praise stops, and the bad news starts.

First off, the hit detection is horrible. I've lost count of how many times i chase after a coin until my hands, feet and most of my body are sticking through it, think "ok, i've got it", only to turn around and watch it slide off a cliff anyway. For a completionist like me, this is absolutely infuriating. It seems like you only get them if your head makes contact, and the hit box should definitely be bigger than that.

Second is the controls and execution. While i liked the moves you could do in this game, they were designed in ways that impede player progress. Chief among these is the wall running and jumping - having to hold up before contact in order to run along it, being unable to stop running up a wall until you hit the peak of your climp or jump off, and having the left / right directions cause you to jump off instead of simply let go all contribute to awkward, frustrating controls and cheap deaths for players. Often i would be climbing up a shift, miss a coin and decide to drop down, only to jump even higher, often into spikes or other hazards. this could easily be avoided by making left and right cause the character to let go, setting it up so that how long you hold up determines how long you run, or allowing the player to cancel their run at any time by pressing down.
Responsiveness is also an issue - often the game will interpret a held press of A as a tap, or i'll hold up to do a wall run but slide off anyway. This could completely turn the tide of a battle, being able to do the exact same commands at the exact same time and achieve vastly different results purely based on whether the inputs registered correctly or not.
The controls just feel very sloppy and unresponsive to me.

Finally is the biggest killer - glitches. Around 40% of my deaths were glitch related; either i'd fail to grab onto a solid wall, glitch straight past it into an area i can't recover from, or the octopod would be unrecoverable, breaking an essential puzzle, glitches were one of my major downfalls. I actually stopped playing shortly after killing the death worm, because my character stopped listening to me in order to concentrate on his shadow clone jutsu. In other words, he glitched through the mountain and the game started making him appear all over the place, trying to figure out where the fuck he was meant to be. I couldn't even kill myself so i just gave up there, but it just goes to show how bad some of them are.

All in all, i'm very sad that i have to give this game a bad review. It seemed like something i would really like, but there are too many fatal flaws in it for it to be enjoyable. Hopefully you make something similar with tighter, remappable controls and spend more time ensuring its stability before release.

Rated 4.5 / 5 stars2011-10-31 12:15:51

Rated 4 / 5 stars2011-10-30 23:32:38

A very enjoyable game with a few nagging flaws

This is probably one of the most well made flash games I've played on this site in a while. The story was pleasantly simple and cute, as were the graphics, and all of the game play mechanics (which worked consistently well) were clearly introduced one by one with a slickness that made me think of Nintendo. That said, there were a couple things that are keeping me from giving it a perfect score.

The first is the game's difficulty. Even with only two lives to work with, I found the game was still relatively easy to beat on the Hard setting, and the lack of medals and unlockables made me question why I even bothered in the first place.

Second, I would have liked to have seen some more enemy variety. Fighting the same two enemy types started to grow tiring by the game's climax.

Lastly, I found the most entertaining element of this game was it's "Prince of Persia/Ninja Gaiden" style platforming. The level designs were good and unique overall, however, I found that only a select few levels (like the Dungeon Barracks and Mt. Endeavor, which have you leaping from wall to wall as you climb up or down) really took advantage of the climbing mechanic.

Overall, this was still a very enjoyable little game and may be the first time I've ever willingly embarked to rescue someone else's girlfriend for them. Put this much effort into your next project and it won't be the last.